Punctum Saliens

I just started reading Who Dies? by Stephen Levine. Tim Freke recommended this book and I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj to a mutual friend and I am deeply indebted to him. Tim is an amazing person and if you ever get the chance to attend one of his events I highly recommend doing so. Here are a few paragraphs from Chapter 2 of Who Dies?:

There is so much of ourselves we wish not to experience. So much fear, guilt, anger, confusion, and self-pity. Sop much self-doubt, so many weak excuses. Is it any wonder, considering the bizarre insistence of our conditioning — the conflict of one value system with another in the mind — that we feel so incomplete. One moment the mind is saying. “Take a big piece,” and then the next it says, “I wouldn’t have done that if I were you.” No wonder we are all crazy, so fractured, trying to protect ourselves from who we fear we are. We dare not share out minds with anyone, even ourselves. We are so frightened of who we might , of not being loved or lovable for the convolutions of our thoughts.

But states of mind, though uninvited, are constantly coming and going, and some we wish would ever come again. They do, and we find ourselves scrambling for leverage to keep our fear down, experiencing the nausea of our immense insecurity and self-loathing.

This persistent elimination from awareness of unwanted states of mind leaves us constantly feeling threatened as we look and say regretfully, “That can’t be me, that fear isn’t really who I am. Anger isn’t me. That self-hatred, that guilt, can’t be who I am.” But there it is. And you wonder who you really are. How do you open to that which you deny? That which you think somehow shouldn’t be there even though it is?

We wish we were otherwise and that is our hell, our resistance to life.

It is almost as though we have become a fractured image of our original being. Our experience with the world has become like looking into a mirror that a great stone has fallen on and shattered into hundreds of pieces, broken from a single unified reality into some splintered reflection of what is seen, of what is imagined to exist. As we look at this fractured reality, we notice with dismay certain parts of the reflection are not what we wish to see or want to be seen. “I don’t want anyone so see my lust; that’s not such a good thing to have. I’m not supposed to be like that. No one’s mind is as crazy as mine.” So we take a piece out. “Oh, there I am really sorry for myself. If they only knew what my life had been like! Ah, but they don’t.” And that piece is removed as well. You notice your greed and self-interest, the sexual fantasies, the competition and confusion of the mind. And you start picking these pieces out. Because these are unacceptable parts of who you think you are supposed to be.

But I think it is very useful, and indeed more accurate, to call it “the mind” instead of “my mind.”

Because when you call it “my mind” you start removing so many pieces that when you look down at this fractured mirror it reflects back very little of what is real. It only displays those qualities you wish to project as being who you are, eliminating all the rest, eluding your wholeness. We thing we have something to hide. Yet this self-protection is our imprisonment. Imagine if for the next twenty-four hours you had to wear a cap that amplified your thoughts so that everyone within a hundred yards of you could hear every thought that passed through your head. Imagine if the mind were broadcast so that all about you could overhear “your” thoughts and fantasies, “your” dreams and fears. How embarrassed or fearful would you be to go outside? How long would you let your fear of the mind continue to isolate you from the hearts of others? And though this experiment sounds like one which few might care to participate in, imagine how freeing it would be at last to have nothing to hide. And how miraculous it would be to see that all others’ minds too were filled with the same confusion and fantasies, the same insecurity and doubt. How long would it take the judgemental mind to begin to release its grasp, to see through the illusion of separateness, to recognize with some humor the craziness of all beings’ minds, the craziness of mind itself?

To be whole we must deny nothing.

What Levine is saying here really fits in well with the Jungian idea of “the shadow” and how we must integrate our shadow into our lives instead of continuing to repress and deny it. Robert Bly has a marvelous book called A Little Book on the Human Shadow. It truly is “little” — you can easily read the whole thing in one short sitting. In it, Bly compares our shadow with a bag that we drag around behind us and into which we put all the things from ourselves that don’t “work.” All our “negative” traits that we are not “supposed” to have or that are not “socially acceptable” or that are not “religiously acceptable” are shoved into our bag. The problem is that when something happens that triggers the release of one of these emotions — and that inevitably will happen — it comes roaring out of the bag like a sumo wrestler on PCP. If we don’t integrate our shadow it reacts out of our control and that’s not a pretty sight.

As C.G. Jung said: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.”